Hitting a brick wall at 70 mph.

I want so badly to write, but I don't know what to say.

I'm currently reading Waiting with Gabriel. It's a story written by the mother of a baby boy who was diagnosed with Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome, and his parents being forced to chose between endless surgeries or "comfort care" that would result in his passing a few days after being born. I've only read 29 pages so far yet they seem like a memory of mine, pulled out and written on paper.

Magdalyn's diagnosis was even more severe than Gabriel's. Hypoplastic right heart with pulmonary stenosis and dextrocardia. They never did an autopsy, so we can't say for sure if anything else might have been wrong or how severe the heart block was.

I can't imagine the pain the might have endured if she had lived longer. If given the choice, which would I have chosen? As it is, her very very brief time on this earth was spent in surgery. We were told she would die almost immediately if she did not have the pacemaker put in. She would not survive. This was her only chance. She died an hour after surgery.

It's strange the things I remember; these tiny memories so strong that they bring me to tears and leave me teetering on the edge of losing it.

We were in our room waiting to be told that we could go see her. The doctor came in and told us that we needed to go now, or we might be too late. We were waiting to get clearance to move me, since I had just been more or less severed in two, and I was not supposed to be in a sitting position for another six hours. My nurse walked in and said she wasn't waiting anymore. I don't remember getting from the bed to the chair. I just remember that my nurse was pushing the wheelchair so fast that I felt like she was almost running. I was not upset. I was excited. I was about to see my baby girl for the first time. When she was born they rushed her off so quickly that I never got to see her.

I never saw my baby alive.

When we entered the NICU I saw the team of doctors, there were nine or ten of them around her. Just standing. Then I heard it. The sound of a flat line on a heart monitor. You hear this sound all the time on TV and in movies. It is now in my head as the worst sound in the entire world. The worst sound of my life. The sound of the end of her life. I wasn't told by a doctor while I was in a waiting room. I wasn't standing around, pacing back and forth. I was trapped in a wheelchair and the sound of that flat line was like being in a car and hitting a brick wall at 70 mph.

Surely there were other babies in the NICU, but I don't remember seeing any baby in that room but my daughter. There must have been nurses and parents, but I don't remember them.

My baby is in heaven. She is with God. She is not in pain. I try to take comfort in this. But some times, some days, I just want my baby to be here with me. And today, today is one of those days.